A member asked the Online Facilitation Group for an updated definition of community. Trailing below is the compiled dialogue to date with my own synthesis trailing at the end.

It was suggested that “community is an act of faith” and went on to state that “It’s probably not a definition you’d give to a corporate person seeking to understand what we do. I’m sure you’d get that glassy-eyed fake look we all have had to put up with. God, I hate smiling back at those people. But as a builder, that’s what it is to me.

You make a sale to members. I’m creating this environment. If you put the best of yourselves in it, you’ll get something wonderful and unexpected out of it. Then you have faith people will do that because you thought out your environment and social contract well, and you’re taking care of them.

Faith is broken many times, and the builder and each member has to be responsible for themselves. It takes a special personality to be able to keep on doing it. The problem I’ve always come across when talking to finance people is that they need plans, and the serendipity that comes when the faith works and forms a great community can’t really be predicted. Or maybe it can.

That response generated additional thoughts:

If people see productive responses to their productive input, their trust in it grows and goodness happens. I would place more emphasis on the members themselves - rather than ‘you thought out the environment’ - I work more on a ‘pull everyone together to co-create the environment’ - making it theirs through and through; ownership of the rules/guidelines, moderation processes, etc. can be mutual if they are all discussed together - making the ‘community builder’s’ role more of a structural facilitator than expert - and then getting on with the taking care of them once it’s up and running.

A new definition surfaced:

Community: Sufficient depth of commitment to a group, its members and its purpose that both independent creativity and interdependent cooperation are maximized simultaneously.

This definition was responded to with the suggustion:

I’d take it one step further and suggest that no one person or corporation orchestrates community; rather, online (and offline) community is an organic, natural, process (our antibodies are a community too!) and I believe true communities are self-organising. this isn’t to say that they don’t naturally end up with leaders and/or leadership, governments, etc. because they do. So in fact, we don’t create anything as a single entity, in my opinion. We may get lucky and provide real estate…and recognise that like highway patrolmen, where there’s one - there’s two.

In response the original poster responded: “I am very very happy you wrote this, because it is very very tru, that you can work and work and ths community grows or not, but most of the times, you cannot control its birth easily!”

The community facilitator then jumped into the discussion and offered that there have been some very interesting comments on Tara Hunt’s blog (HorsePigCow) recently about the issue of what is online community and referred specifically to the following posts and the comments that were generated:

What do you mean community isn’t about warm and fuzzy all the time?

There seems to be a bit of a misconception that ‘community’ means being in some sort of love-in state all of the time. The way some people talk about it, I envision 70’s hippie communes where everybody shares nicely and dances around and nobody disagrees.

Well, those hippie communes didn’t work that way and neither do communities.

Community or Not a Community?

Quote from the post: Sometimes what we’re calling communities are in fact arguments, or conversations, or people who happen to like the same brand of orange juice.

Comments: Chas Grundy suggested: as The Cluetrain Manifesto says, “markets are conversations.” As I see it, “community” is a euphemism for a market.

Comments: Tara responded: right…but by ‘market’, the Cluetrain authors meant more ‘marketplace’ rather than the seller to buyer…meaning that marketplaces are full of conversations…between customers and that is what should be heeded. Community isn’t and won’t ever be a euphemism for market. Community should mean people bonded in some deeper form to work towards something better, safer, more desirable. Sometimes a commercial entity is involved, but I can’t think of a single instance where it is the central force that unites.

Community or Not Community? Part II

Conference Notes: Community and what is REALLY Next (hint: I don’t know)

The facilitator went on to offer: Some of what strikes me here is our diversity of meaning for the word community, online community and the very weird deja vu I get from the conversations. The tools have changed since the first boom of online community in the 90’s, but the issues really haven’t. I find that interesting. There is something enduring here.

The final comment in the thread shared some insight gleaned from a diva marketing interview with the founders of blogher and found this quote:

“People often define Web 1.0 as one-way communications vs. Web 2.0 being two-way communications. I take that a step further and say that online community is circular communications. Speak, then listen, then respond. Rinse and repeat. You?ll get smarter, and your community will feel invested and empowered.”

There’s a generative feedback dialogue loop here.

Synthesis

There are no guarantees in community building - it is as much an art as it is science - and requires a leap of faith on the part of the facilitator. You don’t always get out of it what you put in, but when you do it’s more than worth the effort. A community is organic and self-organizing and the most we can hope to do is provide a solid foundation and let the dynamics play out as they will. Throughout history the tools, technologies, and buzzwords have changed but the themes and challenges have endured.

Since I attended the ASAE Technology Conference last week, I have really gotten bitten by the Web 2.0 bug. It’s not that I hadn’t been aware of it (I have been blogging and participating in open source development for a number of years) but I guess I simply decided to avoid the hype. In the 2004 publication “Online Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions” Jim Cashel from Forum One Communications was quoted as saying: “There seems to be an inverse correlation between how much attention a technology receives and how impactful it is.” This pretty much sums up the way I have felt (until recently) about all of the attention the Web 2.0 phenomenon is receiving.

Part of my reluctance to embrace the concept probably has more to do with my experience with the “dot.com” boom and bust and seeing online businesses create a ton of media hype and raise gobs of venture capital with no tangible product or service to show for the effort while they made millions in the process. However, this time the revolution appears to be built on a much stronger foundation. Without going into too many details, I would go so far as to say that while there has been a substantive amount of hype similar to the first so-called internet revolution, this wave of innovation appears to be the mirror-opposite. Admittedly, I still don’t like the term “Web 2.0″, but that aside, I also have to say that it is more than just hype, rather I think it is transformational.

Bill Thompson, an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service program Digital Planet wrote an article today titled “The mash-up future of the web” that I think really captures the transformational nature of how we are interacting with the web today.

When the web was young we were happy just to see words and pictures on the screen in front of us.

All backgrounds were grey, all fonts were Times and anything other than a static image required a “helper application” to be loaded and run, so that video clips and sounds played in separate windows on screen.

Compared to the text-based internet of the 1980’s it was heaven, but it was only the beginning.

Since 1994 we have seen the web turn into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia experience, with the simple page layouts we once delighted in replaced by interactive services and web-based tools, while embedded video is everywhere.

He describes how services like MySpace, Flickr, Google Maps, and Wikipedia have caused a shift from a “read-only” to “read-write” interaction, an improvement over where we were, but not a full realization of the true potential of the web. He suggests that the real break through:

…comes from having the ability to take other people’s content and then filter, refine, recombine and reuse it in interesting and innovative ways.

He cites Yahoo!’s Pipes, an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that can be used create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant as a prime example of the promise of mash-ups made simple.

I have been using pipes for the past week-and-a-half and I have to agree. Pipes is by far one of the easiest and user-friendly online tools that I have used and the results are definitely hinting at something much greater down the road. Granted it does take some learning to get used to, but the beauty of the application lies in its design. Even from the beginning, the worst result that I have produced is a feed with no data but nothing as catastrophic as causing a server to crash or a database to fail. Now, I am not proclaiming to be an expert and believe that my pipes have just scratched at the surface of what is possible, but even so I think that it is really well done. Below are before and after screenshots of my pipe building experiment.

Here is a link to a pipe that I created whichtakes the feeds to over 15 association related blogs that I read along with the feeds from a handful of association and non-profit technology related sites, limits the number of titles that are output from each feed to 10, orders them all by date (most recent first) and then presents the aggregated results. If you visit the pipe yourself, you can even change the number of results returned and then subscribe to the output in your preferred feed format. Truth be told, it took me longer to collect all of the feed links that I needed as inputs than it did to create the working pipe. Pretty cool indeed.

What I like best is the fact that it reduces my reading list for these sites into something that is far more manageable than even my netvibes page could provide. My next step will be to integrate the output into this site to make it even more convenient for me to stay caught-up on my daily association-related reading from my favorite bloggers.

I will close with Bill’s final line from his article:

Yahoo! has given us a glimpse of the networked future, where the world’s information is not only at our fingertips, but available to be mixed, mashed and filtered on demand, giving us what we want, when we want it - and from wherever we can get it. There will be no going back.

I happened across this video right around the Superbowl and then again at the ASAE Technology Conference. It was created by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University as an homage to Web 2.0 and an exploration of how we are changing the web at the same time the web is changing us.

I have made my thoughts well known about my dislike of the term “Web 2.0″ not because I dislike everything that it represents but rather because I think it doesn’t capture the true nature of how interactive and dynamic the internet has become. I think we should be referring to it as Web To…and you can fill in your own modifier. Web to explore. Web to learn. Web to connect. Web to collaborate. Web to publish. Web to be heard… You get the idea. Regardless, I think this is one of the coolest videos I have seen online and one that happens to really explain in visual and dynamic manner how things like RSS, XML, and AJAX have transformed the entire internet user experience.

Nice work Professor Wesch! It looks like your Digital Ethnography Project is really gathering momentum. And by the way, I wish I could have experienced some of your classes myself. You are definitely my type of “anti-teacher” and from the sounds of it, you have fully embraced the socratic method to bring out the best in your students! Awesome, simply awesome!